Nursing home fights to keep its license after heat-related deaths

A dozen residents of the Hollywood Hills Rehabilitation Center died from heat exposure after the facility lost power to its air conditioning during Hurricane Irma in September.

The body count was mounting in a sweltering Hollywood nursing home when a staffer cried out: “They’re dropping like flies.”

Another gave CPR to a patient who clearly had been dead for some time, one of 12 who ultimately perished after Hurricane Irma knocked out the power in September at the Hollywood Hills Rehabilitation Center.

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J. Stephen Menton, an attorney representing the state’s healthcare administration, described that chaos as a hearing began Monday over whether Hollywood Hills should lose its license. He argued that the nursing home failed to provide a safe environment for patients.

Officials for the nursing home countered that Hollywood Hills did everything it could.

“It was Hurricane Irma and acts of God and patients’ complex conditions that came together in a tragic series of events,” said Geoffrey Smith, an attorney representing the nursing home.

“It’s hard to come to any other conclusion but that the facility failed to maintain a safe environment for its residents,” Menton said.

Menton said 11 of the 12 patients who died lived in the facility’s second-floor, which was notably hotter than the first floor, according to first responders and medical personnel from Memorial Regional Hospital, which is directly across the street from the nursing home. Three of the deceased residents all shared an upstairs room, he said.

Two other patients who also shared a second-floor room each had a temperature of 107.5 degrees, he said.

“For many of these health professionals, they had never seen temperatures recorded that high,” Menton said.

Fire-rescue crews had twice responded to the nursing home in the early morning of Sept. 13 and were still at the hospital when a third 911 call came in.

As fire-rescue crews assessed the rest of the nursing home’s residents, they found another dead person and called police. Investigators launched a criminal investigation, which continues.

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A medical examiner on scene took the temperatures of dead residents about four to five hours after they had presumably died. All of those hours later, their temperatures were between 104 and 105 degrees, Menton said.

Smith, the attorney representing the nursing home, said the facility’s cries for help after the AC lost power Sept. 10 were ignored as they reached out to state officials, Gov. Rick Scott, the emergency operation center and Florida Power & Light Co. They were told they would be a priority and ultimately were not, he said.

Fourteen calls were placed to FPL and five to the governor’s cellphone, he said. There also were attempts to reach the emergency operations center.

“The facility administrators took that information to heart. They felt assured that there was, at the highest level of state government, that there would be support and help should it be required,” Smith said, adding it created optimism and a sense of false hope.

And administrators did not evacuate the facility because they knew removing frail, elderly people from the nursing home during a natural disaster could be fatal, the attorney said. At one point, a staffer drove around the neighborhood attempting to flag down an FPL truck.

The day prior to the evacuation, five independent clinicians — doctors, hospice nurses and a physician’s assistant — had all been inside the nursing home and none raised red flags, Smith said. Fire-rescue crews had also responded to a call on Sept. 12.

“Nobody was pressing a panic button,” he said.

When Memorial Regional Hospital’s nurses heard how dire the situation was across the street, two of them, including Judy Frum, the hospital system’s chief nursing officer, walked over to help.

Frum described a frantic scene with nursing home staffers moving patients around. She also was struck by how soaking wet the scrubs were of a man in charge at the nurse’s station and also became concerned with employees’ conditions.

“I just remember an extraordinary amount of heat hitting my face when we walked in past the threshold,” she testified, recalling the moment she entered the building.

Frum said she spent about 25 minutes going door to door and checking on patients. Some were moist and warm to the touch and looked pale and fatigued, she said.

She said the nursing home staff appeared caring and trying to do the best to help. They had set up spot coolers throughout the facility to combat to heat, Menton said.

Dr. Randy Katz, Memorial Regional Hospital’s medical director of emergency services, was woken up at home to come to the hospital to help. When he saw how overwhelmed the emergency room was, he ran over to the nursing home and helped assess and triage residents.

“I vividly remember watching them zip up a body bag, and then I looked and saw a couple of my physicians who were busy taking care of patients,” he testified Monday. “My nursing director looked up to me and said, ‘It’s really bad; we have a lot of patients here.’”

The hearing is expected to last through Friday. Another hearing will be held in March.